BPM SaaS breaks out …

Not news to some of you I am sure, but as you are all starting to realise the BPM industry is heading, hell for leather, toward a SaaS On Demand model. There are a number of vendors I have been engaging with who have development efforts underway (NDAs in place so no point in asking).

Indeed, I would guess this begs a question that most vendors are asking themselves right now. What is the future of their shrink wrapped software market? Is it going to be swallowed (or overtaken) by those who are able to deliver a sublimely easy to use interface and a service that is similarly easy to consume.

In the last week or so we have seen announcements from Lombardi with Blueprint (see the review here), and Appian (but more of that later). I have also tripped over another small player that is busy coming at it from a different direction (Itensil) … effectively designing the whole thing to be so easy to use and flexible that end-user knowledge workers can develop and drive their own work without reference to an IT staff. No doubt we will see more of this sort of thing (SaaS BPM platforms) unveiled at the Gartner BPM Summit next week (where I am delivering the Pre-Conference Tutorial “Ensuring BPM Success” on the Sunday evening).

Coming back to the Appian announcement, that is their aim and objective too. Their core AJAX modeling and deployment platform (Version 5.5) is being built on to provide the basis for their On Demand BPM utility. Amongst other areas being reworked are enhancements needed to deliver a secure and shareable front end (where multiple users will share a common process platform on a single box without being aware of each other). Of course, new functionality is required in the admin area to handle this sort of On Demand capability. I am also due to have a private demo of other new areas of functionality while at the Gartner show.

Right now the service is in alpha mode testing, with selected partners and existing customers using it. In Q2, Appian intend to deliver an infrastructure that partners (and even customers) can use to create their own process templates … that other customers can then use or license (and pay for). The General Availability release is due for Q3.

Pricing sounds as though it will present some challenges (to competitors). Starting at about $15 per user per month for access to a shared virtual server. Dedicated virtual server costs at about double that (with a minimum number of users). Who knows, I might even use it to support BPM Focus (right now I am considering another vendor’s product to drive the processes of BPM Focus). More on that later.

New Web Site - BPMF Learning Framework and Training Schedule

Just a short note to say that the more observant amongst you will have noticed a new look BPM Focus web site … if you haven’t already been there click the BPM Focus logo on the right.

Secondly, if you are interesting in plugging the yawning skills gap in BPM, check out the BPMF Learning Framework and the Public Course Training Schedule.

In the meantime, I am told we will have over 40 people attending my pre-conference workshop at the Gartner BPM Summit (you have to pay extra for this).

As you can see from the anticipated schedule, I will be picking up some frequent flier miles to add to my growing tally [Gold and ExecPlatinum Card here I come] .

We anticipate having an entirely new form of content up there within a week or so - a self assessment tool for BP Maturity Assessment (that is assuming our partners are true to their word ;-/).

We will also be opening the floodgates for an active discussion forum on the site (for those who want to pick the brains of the wider BPMF Community at large). However, I am not holding my breath on that front. Not since the days of the BPR-L mailing list of the early 90s have I seen much active discussion. Any spammers will be immediately ejected and the IP address banned.

And the competition respond …

I received a couple of follow up emails from Lombardi competitors following my review of Lombardi and their new Blueprint offering in Intelligent Enterprise.

First Appian pointing me to their Appian Anywhere press release:

“Appian, the leading provider of Business Process Management (BPM) technology, today announced Appian Anywhere the first full-featured Business Process Management Suite available via an on-demand, software as a service (SaaS) model. The entire award-winning Appian BPM Suite is now available through the Internet browser - there are no downloads required for modeling or running automated processes. This subscription service provides all the functionality of the Appian Enterprise BPM Suite plus additional features to provide organizations and departments with effortless site branding, administration and application deployment …”

And then Savvion SVP Patrick Morrissey, who offers the “following food for thought, on the record”:

“Yesterday’s announcements are a beautiful snapshot of on-demand’s reality and hype in practice. Appian’s solution is a good Web-only application - and we applaud their effort to focus on BPM for the small and medium market (SMBs). Lombardi, however, is trying to use SaaS as a way to divert attention from the fact that they now have a beta modeling tool with PowerPoint export - it’s not on-demand; it’s BPM modeler ‘light’. Savvion has offered a full-featured process modeler as a free download on our website to help business and IT users get started with BPM for more than two years. 75,000 users have downloaded our modeler and we welcome Lombardi’s move to adopting our market leading strategy.”

Clearly Lombardi have their immediate competition rattled. I was aware of Appian’s plans but as Sandy Kemsley points out it seems like a somewhat hurried response. OTOH, Patrick Morrissey clearly hasn’t seen Blueprint (no surprise there), so it I can forgive him for misleading. It is quite a different thing to have a stand alone proprietary modeling tool as against a collaborative modeling environment that is delivered via a SaaS model.

Edit - Feb 15th - Savvion enters the brawl - Column 2 - ebizQ … Sandy’s comment on the same email.

Lombardi Shows The New Direction in BPM Modeling

Some of you bright eyed people will have noticed that Lombardi announced a new process modeling environment today called “Blueprint”. As you will no doubt surmise from my review Put to the Test: Lombardi Takes BPM Mainstream on Intelligent Enterprise, I have known about it for some time. I find it a really interesting development that I think will put a rocket under some of the current process modeling vendors.

An there in lies a set of perspectives that I have been holding off writing about for some time. I have for a long time felt a certain degree of unease around process modeling approaches that require a large amount of effort up front before any real value is delivered. In the 90s this took the form of IDEF0 modeling and SADT/SSADM style approaches.

I was involved in implementing and assessing these approaches and it always worried me how much work they took … and how quickly any particular repository got out of date. In one study I undertook, a rather large, well known British Oil company had decided to build a “process reference” model for their operations in Europe. That was a team of around 100 consultants (from PwC and Oasis) for over a year (work out the budget) to create a reference book of IDEF0 models - the users complained of measuring output … and how incomprehensible the models were … and how they had to develop a set of best practices to help people understand them (like putting all the ICOMs inside role oriented boxes to show who was responsible for undertaking the work). For anyone who is interested, this study was published as part of Process Product Watch (a set of modeling and workflow reviews that I published through the 90s).

I seem to remember the statistic of 6 months being how often you should revisit any part of the business before the models contained in the repository was out of date (and that was a number quoted to me by one of the original brains behind SSADM in 1996). If anything the problems have got worse - the pace of business change and evolution has only accelerated since then.

And that brings us to the modern day. Where we have BP-oriented modeling tools talking about BPM and trying to convince everyone that it is just a matter of a quick export to your favorite BPMS.

Sandy Kemsley, in her excellent blog series from the IDS Scheer event (I was invited but unfortunately could not travel this week), points to a fundamental problem I see in many process modeling repository-oriented tools.

ProcessWorld Day 1: Briefing with Trevor Naidoo of IDS Scheer - Column 2 - ebizQ

“This really came around to the issue of how to get those process models into an execution engine, or if anyone is really doing it at all. Naidoo said that what was moving from ARIS to the execution engine was a “process outline”, which then required some amount of work to hook it up to the BPMS engine (as expected), and that the main value is not in the transfer itself — which could be readily recreated in the BPMS designer directly — but in engaging the business in the entire process design cycle. This, then, is what I suspected: that most people really are redrawing the process models in the BPMS designer, adding who knows how many translation errors along the way, because there is insufficient value to bother with the direct integration. This is not unique to ARIS; I saw the same thing at the Proforma user conference last year.”

And Bruce Silver (who was also at the IDS Process World event) in his posting Almost Dead from Process World talked about two different classes of ARIS user - a group of business people developing a rigorous repository of stuff (about how they do business and the systems/data etc that fit into that); and a second group which are doing BPMS style things - automating their processes, etc.

This is an interesting observation that I think gets to the heart of the disparate camps we see at BPM conferences - where one group is all about the people/soft side and driving organizational transformation; the other is concerned with automating processes using BPM Suites and workflow tools to drive cost and errors out of the process, all the while reducing cycle time.

All very cozy, but at the same time completely at odds with what I think is likely to happen going forward. I have for some time complained that the fidelity is just not yet available when you move models from the repository style tool to the BPMS Suite (if we see widespread adoption of BPDM then this problem will be significantly redressed). Add to this the fact that to make the repository style approach really useful means engaging in a certain degree of “analysis paralysis” as users flounder about wondering where to stop. Part of the problem here is to do with how we represent processes (while flow diagrams are familiar they do not really tell the whole story).

The point is that what most people do is not the best practice. After getting stuck in a rut for while (modeling everything in sight), management is starting to loose patience with the current effort and the team is now being pressured to get some value back out. So perhaps they implement what they have on a BPM Suite. Only problem is that is is often pretty much the same as the original (mess). So now we have an automated mess. After a year or two, people suddenly realize there is another way of looking at the process and end-up throwing out their earlier endeavor, re-implementing a radically improved process that reflects their new-found wisdom. But along the way they have wasted several man-years of effort and untold lost opportunity space.

And this is what concerns me - the amount of time and effort that is needed to get to the point where value is delivered via the comprehensive rspository style approach. Which in a way, brings me full circle to the Lombardi announcement today. An easy to use modeling environment, delivered on demand using a SaaS model and supporting wiki-style collaboration between the protagonists is definitely a much quicker way of getting to value. [Note to Sandy - I too have been using the term Process Wiki for a couple of years ... but I think Blueprint has a ways to go yet before we get to a Process Wiki]. Using this sort of modeling approach it becomes possible to quickly outline the process, flip it over into an execution environment (TeamWorks or some other that supports BPDM) and you are away laughing.

If deployed widely, it will enable a wide variety of users to engage in process modeling (something that is denied to them with virtually all other current approaches). Blueprint relies on the simplicity of the outlining approach and the ease of deployment.

Process and Content - which one trumps the other

In Kiran Garimella’s BPM Blog “Paper, paper, everywhere, but nothing intelligent to read” he responds to an earlier posting by Bruce Silver’s
BPMS Watch » More on BPM and ECM, Kiran points to the need to put content in perspective … a good idea. I had a pretty similar discussion at a workshop last week where I gave my slightly more cynical view.
I would suggest that you should be able to focus on the needs of the process without getting too wound up in the coordination mechanisms of the process (i.e. the implementation details we refer to as “documents”). This little passage was from an article I put together a couple of years back entitled “The Split Personality of BPM” (the title of my upcoming book … but more of that later).

… While all of this sounds a little academic and vague, let us consider an oft quoted but real life example. In the frothy days of Business Process Re-engineering, we heard all about Ford